Rabelais In L.A.

Smog had not yet filled the valley
when Rabelais, on the run again, asked me
to fetch him his bottle. He was

too wrapped up in his mumbles:
"always a fly on the wall,
or around my head somewhere, buzzing..."

Focused on my own glass, I had only caught
the tail end. "That's the end you want,"
he said. "The other end is for the fly."

So I poured another glass
and listened to him talk all night
of moving on, of moving West

and the sad fact we were already there,
drunk beneath a plastic orange tree.